December 18-24, 2003

city beat

Gale Warning

by Daryl Gale

Monday Morning Quarterbacks

The City Paper editorial board had its first post-election meeting scheduled with Mayor John Street Monday at 11 a.m. At about 10:30 a.m., Editor in Chief Howard Altman, Managing Editor/News Brian Hickey, staff writers Deborah Bolling and Amy Webb and yours truly boarded the Market-Frankford El for the 10-minute trip to City Hall.

It's certainly not the first time we've met with the mayor, more like the fifth or sixth, but this one was unusual, to say the least. The mayor was nearly a half-hour late, but there's nothing unusual about that. What was different this time was the presence of the mayor's Cabinet, which I've never seen at one of these sitdowns. Even more unusual was what they had to say.

And so it was that we found ourselves sitting at a large conference table in City Hall's Room 225, the mayor's Reception Room, surrounded by Chief of Staff Joyce Wilkerson, Managing Director Phil Goldsmith, Finance Director Janice Davis, Director of Communications Barbara Grant, and Secretary of External Affairs George Burrell, as well as the mayor himself. The atmosphere was cordial, but there was a palpable tension in the air. The mayor's people, and Burrell especially, weren't too pleased with the media here in Philadelphia and weren't ashamed to let us know it.

Burrell and the other Cabinet members were a bit steamed about a story in Sunday's Inquirer accusing Burrell of jacking up the price of a city contract to include a minority subcontractor, and about the cover story in last week's City Paper, where my colleague Amy wrote about a rather unflattering report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on one of the mayor's pet projects, the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative. In short, the Cabinet members think we in the media are giving the administration the shaft, and are so busy salivating at the prospect of headlines screaming "CITYWIDE CORRUPTION" in 72-point type that we're happy to ignore the facts of how the city handles its business.

"When people read the newspapers, and they read about these contracts, like to Ron White or Shamsud-din Ali, they're getting an unfair or inaccurate perception of how business is handled by the city of Philadelphia," Burrell said. "Take the airport for example. At the airport, [concession contractor] Marketplace/Redwood has a 15-year contract with the absolute right to lease concession space. That's their business. They don't have to ask us who they give it to. They make the decision about who gets concession space at the airport -- not the administration, not anybody in the administration, not anybody at the airport. I'm good with the fact that people want to speculate, but give people all the facts. You people are saying that this mayor and this administration are making arbitrary decisions about something that we have no decision-making authority over."

Writing about city contracts and how they're awarded, Burrell continued, is fair game as long as both sides are included in the reporting. People will read that one of the mayor's friends or political supporters got a piece of the pie, he fumed, but don't know that everyone who bid on that certain contract gave money to the mayor and probably his opponent too. What's more, Burrell said, he thinks the coverage of City Hall is deliberately biased against the Street administration.

"People want to abuse this mayor," he said, "on the issue of pay-to-play like it started with him and it ended with him."

He gave an example of a news article several months ago that he said accused the mayor of engineering a sweetheart deal for a friend, when, in actuality, the deal was struck by his predecessor, Ed Rendell. Then it was the managing director's turn.

"Let me ask you a question," said Goldsmith. "Your front page article on NTI -- would that have occurred if all this other stuff wasn't in play?" He didn't wait for an answer. "It was basically just an audit report -- we get audit reports around here all the time. That's now been blown up as an investigation, because everyone now knows that the word "investigation' says something. Someone asked me the other day whether the mayor is going to have difficulty managing government and I asked the question back whether the media is going to have trouble covering government."

It would be an easy thing to dismiss the volley from the mayor's Cabinet as whining, but they have a point. People do read the papers, and they believe that what we write is the unvarnished truth. But they also vote and pay taxes and they deserve the very best from the people they vote for as well.

So here's our pledge: We'll try not to disappoint you, and we'll try not to let them disappoint you either.

Daryl Gale’s weekly radio show, Dialogues, with co-hosts Rotan Lee and Bill Miller, is burning up the airwaves Fridays 7-10 a.m. on WURD (900 AM) in Philadelphia.